The Untouchable (61 page)

He bolted the door then turned the heavy key in the lock and wedged a chair of stout wood under the handle. He sat on the bed, did not take off his boots, and his greatcoat and his cap, could not shake from his mind the sounds of the screaming. He held the axe, and waited for first light.

They offered him the flask but he refused it. He could not speak to them, nor they to him, but when Ante held the flask in front of him, he shook his head.

He could smell the brandy. He wondered if brandy had kept them on their feet and fighting when they had come out of Srebrenica, or faith, or desperation

.. . and he wondered how it went with Mister and if he had faith to fall back on, or if the desperation grew.

He did not know how it would finish, but he thought he had come near to the end of the road, as he'd pledged. When they had finished with the flask, he reached back, tapped on Ante's arm, pointed to the rifle, and it was given him. He looked through the 'scope sight.

He saw Mister, hunched, still, and then at the extreme edge of the tunnelled vision was a gliding movement that came closer to Mister.

It was a grey-dark shadow on the grey-white field.

The shadow flitted in the moonlight.

It came from behind Mister and skirted him warily.

Not for two years, perhaps more, had there been a fox scavenging in the garden of his home near the North Circular Road. By tripping the beams, the fox set off the security lights and bleeped the consoles in the hall and in the bedroom. Several times Mister and the Princess had been alerted by the bleeps and had stood at the window to watch the mature vixen. A cautious creature, which Mister liked - and without fear, which Mister liked more. Alec Penberthy had said she had a breeding den just inside the fence of the school's playing-fields. At night in the garden she had looked magnificent. He recognized the shadow.

It came by him in a wide half-circle.

It gave him space but did not seem intimidated.

Past three o ' c l o c k . . . The fox was an escape for him.

He had told himself that at three o'clock, when his wristwatch gave him that time, he would make the decision, commit himself, move. Of course, he would move. He was Mister. He did not know fear. He would splay out his hands, sink them down into the grass, use them to push himself up, and then he would walk, with firm strides, towards the river. He had set himself the deadline - three o'clock - and now the minutes ticked past and the watch hands sidled further from the hour. He watched the fox and that was his excuse not to move. It watched him.

Having come past him, so light-footed and so safe against the danger, it settled in front of him, sat. He could see the silhouette of its shadow. When it moved on he would push himself up. That was Mister's promise to himself. When he made a promise it was always kept; his word was his bond. When the fox shifted, he would go. He told himself, repeated it in his mind, that a few minutes did not matter. The fox seemed to study him, as if he intruded into its space. Then it ignored him and scratched. It lashed, with the claws of its back foot, against its neck then under its front leg. Abruptly, it shook itself, then its neck rose and its nostrils pointed up. It sniffed. To have reached where the fox sat on its haunches, he would have had to push himself up, offer his weight to the ground, then take ten strides. He heard its coarse snorting, then it was up. It trotted away. He thought the ground and the grass under its feet would barely have been pressured. It stopped, sniffed again, and then its back sank low, and it went forward.

The fox had located the Eagle, carrion.

It started to circle him. The shadow glided over the grass, and each circle was smaller. He had shot the Eagle, silenced him. And the voice had boomed at him in the night from the tree-line, and he had squirmed. If it had not been for the voice, taunting him - Arc you going to run, Mister? - he would already have gone, started out on the hundred stride paces to the river. It was what Cann wanted, that he should run. Cann wanted his feet, shoes, his weight, pounding down on the earth and grass of the field. Cann wanted the flash and the thunderclap, wanted to hear the scream. Cann was in the trees, waiting on him, a reminder of the consequences of moving: a footfall landing on the antenna of a mine. The fox was close to the Eagle's body.

He could not drag away his eyes.

The Eagle's body was barely visible to Mister. The fox, he thought, investigated the body. He heard the rending of fabric. The fox had found the wound. It pulled on the torn trouser, then began to worry at the leg. He had no more use for the Luger pistol, no further magazine to fill it. He had the PPK Walther pistol in his belt. He saw the shadow of the fox tug at the Eagle's leg. Mister hurled the Luger at the fox. It might have caught the fox's back leg, or its lower stomach, and it yelped shrilly but did not back off. It gazed at Mister. They stared at each other. If the fox had moved away then, Mister would have planted his hands down in the grass, pushed himself up, and started to run or walk towards the river. It did not back off: instead the shadow darted forward. It was a blur against the grass. Mister saw something thrown up into the night air. The fox caught what it had thrown up, then went skittish and ran in tight squares with something in its mouth.

The fox played with the lower length of the Eagle's leg.

It bounced towards the leg and barked over it, tossed it and jumped back from it. Then it settled.

Mister heard the gnawing and the splintering of the bone. He could not fire the PPK Walther at the fox. He would need all the rounds in the pistol when he ran, when he went to the village where the lights burned to look for a car to take him out, away. A stone . . . he looked for a stone. He heard every sound from the fox's jaws. He dropped his hand to the grass beside his buttocks. He tore up the g r a s s and scattered it in front of him. He cleared the grass from a patch the size of the handkerchief in his pocket, scratching into the earth with his fingers. He broke his nails and scrabbled deeper. It was soft earth, finely ground. He did not know that soft earth, milled and worked, had been carried by rain streams from the edge of the field.

He burrowed with his hand, moled his way into the earth to find a stone. He was ever more frantic. He would run when the fox had gone, when he had found a stone and driven the fox off the Eagle's leg.

He felt the hard smoothness. The little hole he had excavated was dark, too deep for the moon's light to reach into. He started to scrape at the side of what he'd uncovered, and he felt the symmetry of the shape. He thought that what he touched was the same size as the Bakelite top of the two-hundred-gram jars of coffee powder that the Princess bought. His fingers eased from the side of the shape to its top and he cleared away more of the cloying earth until he felt the first of the six points that made the little star. The mine was nine inches from his buttock, buried under six inches of soil and root. It was where his hand would have gone, where the pressure would have been concentrated as he pushed himself up and readied himself to run.

The voice, cold and without expression, carried to him from the tree line. 'Time is moving on, Mister. I'd have thought, by now, you'd have run.'

When the voice had dissipated in the darkness, Mister was left with the sound of the fox's teeth on the Eagle's leg, and the frost was crisp in his hair.

The first light of dawn came in a soft smear on the hills behind Ljut village.

Chapter Nineteen

The low sun gilded the valley. Gold was painted on the hills, and on the bare trees. The lustre fell on the fields and was trapped in the grass and in the dead stems of the thistle and ragwort; it nestled on the vineyard posts and glistened off the wires between them. Brilliant little shimmers of light ruddied the bristly back of a pig that had come out of the trees'

cover to snout for food. The softness of the gold was daubed on the fields and the woodlands, and played patterns on the smoke rising from the twin villages.

The smoke turned ochre in the early light as it peeped up from the chimneys and was dispersed. The sun made dazzling reflections in the river where the water ran over shallow stones between the deeper pools.

Joey Cann had watched the dawn come. The valley was laid out in front of him. He rocked with tiredness, and blinked, tried to scrape the confusion from his mind.

If he looked for Mister, he looked into the sun that burned off the frost. He could be patient. The sun would creep higher into the sky and then he would see Mister, would know how the night had gone for him. He sat on the ground with his legs outstretched and reaching to the yellow tape and he propped himself upright on an elbow. The men around him snored quietly and the dog lay close to them. He had thought Mister would have run in the darkness, would have gathered the courage and gone to the river, would have cheated him. Away to his left, he saw a column of pick-ups and ambulances come slowly down the winding track and they stopped near to the village.

He saw an old man come out of the front door of an isolated house further down the track, wearing a uniform greatcoat and a cap of authority and carrying an axe. Across the river, at another house that was separated from its village, children burst through the door and a woman hobbled after them on a crutch.

They went to a man who sat bowed on an old tree log.

The sun rose.

Joey saw Mister and he knew that he was not cheated. Above the field grass, he saw Mister's bent knees, his torn suit jacket, his tie that was askew at his throat, and the hands that held his face, and the hair on his scalp. The smile was at Joey's mouth. He cupped his hands together and his shout broke the peace, seemed lo scatter the gold dust that had fallen on the valley.

'You should have run, Mister, while you had the dark.

Were you too frightened to run?'

He jerked awake. He did not know how long he had slept, or where.

'What stopped you?'

He shook. A shiver rattled him. He was sitting and he thought he was falling. He felt his weight slide, and reached out to steady himself. His hand found the wet grass and the muddied earth, and slipped into the hole. For a moment he could not control its slide. He looked down. He scrabbled for earth, for a grip. His hand was half an inch above the six points of the antenna that would detonate the mine. His muscles were rigid . . . He knew where he was. He recognized the voice, but could not see Cann. His stomach growled in hunger and his throat was parched. Near to him, teeth scraped on a bone. He stared down at the mine in the little excavated pit and saw the mud smears on the green paint. He put the hand under his armpit, locked it there. In the night the trees around the river's roar had made a dark line. Now, the sun shone through them. He could see each branch and each sprig growing from the trees' trunks. The river was safety, a hundred strides away. Mister had never known fear. He took his hand from his armpit, brushed it against his stomach and felt the pistol in his belt. Then he worked the hand under the seat of his trousers, and pushed himself up. He nearly fell because of the stiffness in his knees. He stood, and started to massage his hips, his knees and his ankles.

When he had worked over the flesh, kneaded the joints and ligaments under the skin, he stood to his full height, made a bow arc of his back and stretched his arms. He would run - maybe he would close his eyes - towards the trees by the river. In his mind he put the boxes in their place. He would run for the river. A track of grey stone led from the river to the village, where he would find a car; he had the PPK

Walther pistol. He readied himself. He thought he would count to ten, and then he would run. He should not have, but he looked at the ground between himself and the river. The carcass of bones was bleached white, was cleaned in the sun, as if fresh paint was on it. Grass grew through the ribcage . . .

And the voice intruded once more.

'What you have to think of, Mister, is when it's going to happen: your first step or your last step, or one of the middle steps. At the start, at the end, or in between - you don't know, do you? And you don't know whether you'll scream, like the Eagle screamed.'

After he had seen the first skeleton, Mister counted six more. Some were on their backs, some on their sides, and others had just crumpled down as if their knees had given way beneath them and their heads had fallen forward. Two of the white bone hulks were directly between himself and the river.

Three more were to the right, and two were to the left.

There was no pattern to them. Should he run the shortest way loop to the left or right, or zigzag? He gazed out at the bones.

'Go on, Mister, run. Run so I can hear you scream.'

His legs were stiff, dead. He could not take the step.

Mister stopped the count. He was short of the last number. The wind played on the grass that covered the earth, and moved the dead dark weed stems. He heard the cry of crows above him, and the gnawing of the fox's jaws on the leg bone. He was leaden. The light and the warmth were on his face. He stood alone in the field.

'God, you're a disappointment to me, Mister. Is the fear that bad?'

They woke, they separated. The ground hadn't moved for Maggie Bolton, but the chassis of the blue van had.

Three times they'd done it. She'd let Frank do what neither the Polish boy nor the young Arab had been allowed to. She couldn't have said which of the three times was the best, but she'd have been able to hazard which was the worst. She was in her forty-eighth year.

It had been, for her, the first, second and third time -

and there would not be another. She doubted that even a kid of fifteen, on heat, would have chosen to lose their virginity in the back of the blue van on a bed of coats and rugs, beside the new bucket. If it had been with any of the men in Vauxhall Bridge Cross -

they'd tried hard enough - the bed would at least have cost them two hundred and fifty pounds in a West End hotel. Frank Williams lay against her and his cheek's stubble prickled her breast.